On Linux, Web Development, Joomla and Magento commerce

Articles in the Web Development Category

rsync -av –include=’*/’ –exclude=’*’ /src/path /destination/path
An example where we use it is when building Magento templates and themes, we copy the directory structure across but not the files so that when we need to, we can copy a file across from the base theme without having to create the directory structure before copying the file:
rsync -av –include=’*/’ –exclude=’*’ app/design/frontend/base/default/ app/design/frontend/default/default/

High Quality – File size ends up being larger than the M4V
for i in *.m4v;do ffmpeg -i $i -ar 22050 -qscale .1 ${i%.*}.flv;done
Quality is almost indiscernible from the original M4V in a laptop
for i in *.m4v;do ffmpeg -i $i -ar 22050 -ab 96k -qscale 2 ${i%.*}.flv;done
Slight degradation in quality. File size approx. 35% less than the original m4v.
for i in *.m4v;do ffmpeg -i $i -ar 22050 -ab 96k -qscale 5 ${i%.*}.flv;done

Quite easy really, once you know how.
First we add in the Epel repo for 64bit Centos5
rpm -Uvh http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/epel/5/x86_64/epel-release-5-4.noarch.rpm
and then you need to disableexcludes in yum due to Cpanel disabling Perl from yum updates. So to install git now, we run.
yum –disableexcludes=main install git
Simple, really.

mod_rewrite is a powerful Apache module that gives you the power over the URL’s displayed to your visitors to your site.
Much has been written already by many people using both examples and tutorials of the basics. The aim of my addition, as always is primarily for my own notes and secondarily to explain why you want to use mod_rewrite for SEO ranking retention.
Let’s say you have a website that enjoys well ranked pages and a lot of traffic via google or has a great deal of Backlinks from other …

Today, I came across a document where I had to type a degree symbol in Linux. Thanks to this post at Arch Linux Forums, it was painless to find out how. So here it is:
In windows, apparently you hold down Alt+0176.
Linux is different and to achieve the same, hold down Ctrl+Shift and type u+00b0, though if you are writing for html, the correct symbol is
&deg;
Alternatively you can copy and paste it from this table on wikipedia, which includes other useful symbols like Pound, Registered and Copyright.
It will actually type the …

Pluf is a PHP Framework developed as a port of Django to PHP. It claims to be simple, elegant and easy for people used to Django but in PHP5 so easy to deploy all over the world.
After reading the documentation, the file layout and concepts are all quite similar to django, though a downside is that we lose much of the beauty of the Python language and it doesn’t seem to have the Admin interface that makes django so delightful to work with.
Here is a sample of a helloworld, which …

So, you have used Website Optimization Analyzer or you installed Yslow for Firefox or you discovered somewhere else that compressing your files (html, javascript & css) is a good thing to do. Unfortunately, it’s not always as easy as it looks to do this.
In Apache web hosting environments, there is a module called mod_deflate (for 2.x versions) or mod_gzip (for 1.3) versions. This is generally the easiest way to get content compressed. As in my last post about Magento, you should normally be able to enable this safely with the …

Having implemented a number of websites now in Magento and being the web hosting provider for them also, it’s been both challenging and rewarding trying to get Magento running at an acceptable speed.People generally don’t understand what’s happening when they say “my website is slow”. So, for those of you unfamiliar with benchmarking / understanding what factors to consider when a page loads from a server, we have quite a number of variables.

Your URL you type into a browser, translates to an IP address – this check should take a …

One area sadly lacking in most Linux installs is the availability of really nice fonts useful for design and great fonts are not cheap, circa $150 for a font set. Best all in one location for getting great free fonts, I think is www.fawnt.com
If Ubuntu really wants to have a go at competing with the Mac, this is certainly an area that needs improving.
You can install fonts system wide by dropping them (or folders of font families) into /usr/share/fonts or alternatively, kfontviewer a KDE application will give you a nice …